Russell Beattie

Andrew, of course, is completely right (via Dave). It's his personal bugbear without doubt, but the fact is that the quality of searches is dwindling at Google as the result of BlogNoise. They're smart guys at Google and they are undoubtedly doing something about it.

As I've posted before, I love the notoriety that Google's ranking has given this site - my Mom was impressed that I'm the #1 Beattie and on the first page of the Russells- however, I pity many of the people who find this site via Google looking for anything besides opinions. Personally, I'm getting SICK of running into my OWN BLOG while doing research into any of the topics that I've ranted about here. I spend a couple posts talking about a technology with questions or thoughts, then later I go to implement this tech and need specifics and yet 2 or 3 of the top ranks are filled with my annoying blather. Urgh! My Google referrers are running about 150 to 200 a day. Multiply that by all the bloggers and you start to see the effect.

I wonder if Google will just launch the new Blogger tab and just wack the ranks all at once or whether they'll slowly adjust their algorithm? Like the article says, they know full well which websites are blogs - constant updates, dated posts, 'permalinks', incestuous linking - it can't be that hard and like I said, these guys are damns smart.

While we're on the topic Jeremy just pointed out this interesting article on Google from Forbes which goes into some detail about the company and business operations. I found a couple paragraphs very interesting including this one on Adwords:

"Some companies have purchased thousands of keywords, and they use them to test multiple products against multiple words," says Sheryl Sandberg, director of the wildly successful Adwords program. Noting most all Adwords bidders are U.S.-based, while half of Google searches are by users overseas, Sandberg sees huge growth in foreign markets. "The monetization should follow. This is a global bid," she says. Ads are sold in 11 languages.

It's amazing that "most all Adwords bidders are U.S.-based". Very, very interesting. I wonder why. I can tell you from experience that here in Spain, Google ("goo-GLAY") is used as much as anywhere. This looks like a great opportunity. It's something to keep in mind while making plans for the future, because shortly blogging isn't going to be the way to get free high-rankings any more.

And that's the main linking point in my mind: The article's concentration on Adwords made me realize that Bloggers are taking money out of Google's pocket (and they know it). I would propose that it's a hell of a lot cheaper for a company to attract the attention of bloggers (think MS) and get lots of links thus moving their company or product's ranking up in Google than it is to buy Adwords. (And more effective as well for those of us who have "Adword blindness"). Google's earning BILLIONS of dollars with Adwords, so I'm sure they want to make sure that any form of "gaming" their system is quickly removed.

Ahh. Oh well. It was good while it lasted. :-)

-Russ

Later... I refreshed my referrers page a little while before I wrote this post to see what sort of Google searches would come up. In the time it took me to read the articles and write this post, these links appeared:

* 2003-05-09 09:20:25 - "keypaso Redhat "
* 2003-05-09 09:24:33 - "ikaruga save data file"
* 2003-05-09 09:28:25 - "persian blog"
* 2003-05-09 09:40:01 - "kanji of the day PDA"
* 2003-05-09 09:41:47 - "XDoclet tutorial"
* 2003-05-09 09:47:10 - ""Gnome Vs KDE""
* 2003-05-09 09:48:25 - "looking down at the statue of liberty"

I can guarantee that I am an authority on NONE of those searches.

-R